


Of Snow, and Arthuriana, and Mirrors

by Silvereye



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (is he alright? no. but he is trying), First Kiss, Multi, POV Richard Gansey III, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Canon, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29246469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: On their road trip, Gansey, Blue and Henry discover themselves snowed in.
Relationships: Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent
Comments: 10
Kudos: 36
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Of Snow, and Arthuriana, and Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likeadeuce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/gifts).



When they woke up, the light through the curtains was strange, a subdued, too-bright sort of glow. It should have been a contradiction: subdued, too-bright. Evidently, it was not.

Henry was the quickest to the window. Gansey would have ordinarily been more awake in the early morning, but Blue was curled against him, hair tickling the underside of his chin and so he was not enthusiastic about getting up. Henry, having no particular feelings for his blankets, raised the curtain a little and said: “Ah, shit.”

“What?” Blue said.

“Snow. Enough snow to hinder an entire party of valiant pioneers. I do hope we’re not on the Oregon Trail.”

“That’s Wyoming, I think,” Blue said. “We’re in Colorado.” But she did extricate herself from the blankets, joined Henry by the window and hummed in annoyance. “That’s more snow than threatened in the weather forecast.”

Gansey surrendered to the inevitability and followed them to the window. He tried to not be distracted by Blue’s legs below the too-long T-shirt she slept in. It was only partially successful, so he peered over Blue and Henry’s shoulders and lifted the curtain higher.

It was more snow than threatened in the weather forecast. The forecast had said “possible snow flurries” and the owner of the cabin had said “won’t shut it for winter yet” and so they had thought nothing of staying here. They definitely hadn’t thought that there could be… several inches of snow, judging by the soft white hats on the fence posts. It wasn’t an inoffensive easily-passable kind of snow either. Gansey knew that dream-car or not, he didn’t want to take the Pig down the narrow road to the town proper in this one.

They considered the snow. The snow did not consider them at all.

“Now what?” Blue said.

“In Vancouver we would despair and offer unconditional surrender to the weather,” Henry said, his voice light, which made it hard to know how serious he was.

As one, they looked towards Gansey. Something in their regard made Gansey’s heart make a complicated sideways movement: it was a bit like the old certainty he used to inspire in Blue and Adam and Ronan (he was a king, and they were on a quest), but it was also perfectly mundane (Gansey had seen everything, and it surely encompassed being snowed in).

He was not precisely a king. He did indeed have an idea.

“I’ll call our kind host,” he said.

#

Their kind host understood their problem; their kind host was also pressed to service elsewhere and couldn’t plow the road leading to the cabin before evening. She was apologetic. There was nothing to be done unless they wanted someone to come get them and leave their car for the time being.

“Dismal,” Henry said.

“Understandable,” Gansey said, smiling a little. “Not enough plows, but many people who would like to be liberated from snow. most of whom are in the town, not up here. And it’s not snowing any more, so we’re not in any danger.”

“Still,” Henry said. “What _do_ you do when you’re snowed in?”

They looked at each other.

“Snow angels,” Blue said decisively.

#

They made snow angels. They wandered in the forest around the cabin, as much as was possible in this snow. Then they had a protracted snowball fight that ended when Blue and Henry teamed up on Gansey. It was a fair enough maneuver, given that Gansey and Blue had started the fight by ambushing Henry, but the result was still ignoble.

Fortunately, there were electric heaters in the cabin. There was also a stove, but their earlier attempts at operating it had been embarrassing failures (who knew that putting wood in a brick box and setting it on fire could be so complicated?), and so they left it alone.

Everything else was the opposite of difficult, however. They stripped their wet outer clothes and draped them on everything that could serve as a clothes rest, strategically setting up the heaters to dry the clothes as quickly as possible. They made tea with the small kettle and the last of a rose hip and hibiscus tea that Blue had picked up in Kansas. It didn’t require words, this easy practicality. In the end they converged on Gansey and Blue’s bed, because it was about the only piece of furniture that didn’t hold a coat or sweater or scarf or pair of pants.

Gansey sat with his back to the wall. Blue settled herself against his left side and sighed contentedly. Henry looked at them with something complicated behind his eyes.

“There is room enough for you here,” Gansey said. He had one of those slipping-time premonitions that had become rarer as they drifted further from the ley line: he almost knew the words Henry would say with that bright joviality that tended to overcome him when he could not fit his thoughts into imprecise words. It would start with _GanseyMan_ and go from there.

It did not. Henry sat down and said nothing, his left shoulder against Gansey’s right, knees drawn to his chest, feet on the edge of the bed. He hadn’t changed into jeans, but then all of them were in thermal long johns they’d worn under their snow-sensible pants, so it wasn’t as if Gansey had any room to remark on Henry’s choice of clothing.

RoboBee alighted from the windowsill and landed on Henry’s fingers. Henry turned his hand and watched the bee walk up and down his knuckles. Its glowing heart pulsed in time with Henry’s heart, or maybe Gansey’s, or maybe all of their hearts.

Gansey should have said something. Followed up that last sentence, more clearly, more conclusively. But he was a Gansey, terminally afflicted with subtlety instead of clarity, and Henry had picked silence instead of being imperfectly himself out loud. Blue, Gansey thought, was watching them, and probably aware of the currents of silence.

None of them said anything.

It was warm in the cabin. Gansey was pleasantly exhausted after the day in the snow and the other two could not have been more awake. Eventually he nodded off to a nap.

#

Time stuttered forward. It was still light outside when Gansey woke up, but an evening kind of light. He blinked sleep from his eyes. His phone buzzed again. He extricated himself from Blue and Henry, half-waking on either side of him, and went out to the porch to take the call.

It was the owner of the cabin, apologetic through briskness. She couldn’t come to their rescue that evening because there had been an accident and everything resembling a plow was needed elsewhere. Could they hang on until the next morning?

A wild current of anxiety jittered up Gansey’s spine: there would be delay after delay and all four of them (himself, Blue, Henry, Pig) would not come down from the forest. Pig would have to be left. Possibly he and Henry and Blue would have to resort to hunting to feed themselves. But that was unrealistic. There was still electricity in the cabin and they had a small array of what Blue decisively called _travel food_ in the car. They would not starve yet.

Yes, we can hang on until the next morning, he said. No problem. Thank you for letting us know.

She hang up. It was very quiet, the kind of silence that only really happened in a forest in winter when all the animals had decided that venturing out would be too much hassle. Blue said something in the cabin, more muffled by the door than it should have been. Gansey stared up into the cloudless sky, and shivered, and decided to go inside before his socks got wet.

It was dimmer in the cabin than it was outside; their little nest on the bed was dimmer still. It seemed smaller, as if there wasn’t exactly room for all three of them, as if Blue and Henry had somehow become an island of their own in those scant minutes. Gansey was not a stranger to being unmoored, but it was always uncanny.

“We have to stay the night,” he said, because he had to say something.

“Mm,” Henry said, non-committal.

“We heard your half of the conversation,” Blue said more kindly.

Gansey didn’t know what to do, and so he turned away, checked their clothes (dry, all of them dried), turned off one of the heaters, made an uncertain circuit of the room. Ended up by the bed again, the way a planet always returned to the perihelion. Blue and Henry regarded him, wordlessly, intently.

Blue stretched out her hand and said: “Come here.”

Sitting on the bed between them did not feel like the almost-easy silence of the afternoon. It felt different, the way dreams felt different from one another. But it was not quite a nightmare.

“I should –“ Henry said, restlessly, and started to rise. Blue leaned over and caught his wrist with one hand, the other planted on Gansey’s thigh for balance. Henry stilled. Blue tugged a little and he sat down on the edge of the bed. His face was doing something half-hidden and complicated and fragile.

Blue leaned further, her hand still hot and firm and immovable on Gansey’s thigh. Her face was very intent. She kissed Henry, softly, on the lips, and pulled back a little. Henry did not move, except for the rise and fall of his chest. His eyes were closed.

“There is room enough for you here,” Blue said, echoing Gansey’s words. But she was a mirror who made things clearer.

“I’m,” Henry said unsteadily. He swallowed. “I must have forgotten my Arthuriana. Do refresh my mind, will you? What happens to knights who trespass between a king and his queen? Is it anything good?”

“This isn’t a trespass,” Gansey said.

Henry opened his eyes and looked at Gansey, flinty-gazed. “Dick, my good man, you _died_ because the universe said you were her true love, explicitly, with very clear lettering on the certificate.” His breath caught. Gansey could see him inventorying Gansey’s probable response, and his own response, and deciding not to waste words on them. Henry said: “I have always gotten over my yearnings. I _will not_ bear being on the outside and looking in after you two star-crossed true loves are done.”

“The universe said he was going to die, being my true love and all,” Blue said, a little tetchy but not unkind. “It didn’t say anything about what came later.” She gestured towards Gansey, as if saying: not dead at all.

Gansey closed his eyes and said: “If you had not been there, I would still be very afraid, and very tangled in my search for Glendower, and possibly very dead.” He remembered those unmoments of his death sometimes, the way trees remembered everything in a lazy, hazy way. _Do something_ , Henry had said, he who was not a dreamer or a magician or a mirror, and he had been a catalyst.

“I cannot promise it will not ever end,” Gansey added. “I also cannot promise I won’t accidentally do something so egregious Blue will kick me to the curb, true love or not.”

Blue snorted.

Henry said: “Self-deprecation does not suit you very well, Dick Gansey.” But his voice was less armored this time.

I wasn’t trying to self-deprecate, Gansey could have said. He didn’t, because that would have necessitated explaining it all out loud: he didn’t exactly expect to ever annoy Blue so hard she’d dump him, but he was always distantly aware of it being a possibility. He had fucked up, he would again, and from there it was a question of degree. It was unlikely – they’d always been able to discuss things with Blue – but he still could not shake the thought.

Funny. He’d spent so many years distantly aware of his past and future death, a quiet background murmur of terror and yearning. That was in the past now, and his mind simply found new things to be miserable about. Maybe it was too habituated to being afraid. Maybe he always would be.

Nothing to do about that. He inhaled and said: “What I meant is that you’re not lesser to us. There isn’t a… qualifications list that says all applicants must have an otherworldly connection to Cabeswater and at least one psychic proclaiming true love. I do want this. By which I mean you, and Blue, the three of us, in a triangle, if that is the word. Do you?”

This was so far outside his usual operating parameters. Ganseys rarely asked for anything, they quietly did things and hoped for reciprocity. But that was not a reasonable way to negotiate polyamory.

He really should have read up on this. Blue probably had. Blue probably had a references list somewhere, because she was sensible and prepared, while Gansey was an anxious if well-polished disaster. He looked towards her, trying to communicate _was this enough emotional honesty_ and _I wouldn’t dare to speak for you what do you think_ in equal amounts.

Blue smiled at him, then at Henry, then said: “I think I have made my position clear.”

“Indeed,” Henry said, touching his lips. “Yes. I do.”

He leaned towards Blue across Gansey and kissed her back, a little longer, a little less chaste, a little uncertain still. He touched her cheek, drew back, looked towards Gansey.

So Gansey pressed his lips to Henry’s and closed his eyes, and drew back first. He needed to catch his breath or maybe throw out all his vague plans for the future so they could stay in this cabin and keep doing this forever. He wasn’t sure.

It was different. It was similar. A kiss was a kiss, yet all the people were different and so the kisses were also different. Blue made him feel quiet, which was rare, but Henry made him _unblurred_ , which was no more common. Gansey was almost always a collage of different Ganseys overlapping, not quite in sync with each other, different personas for different people, but right now he was none of that. Only himself.

He was smiling. He thought he might cry.

“I think I broke him,” Henry said, joking and a little too bright. “Gansey, are you okay there? Are you experiencing some sort of bisexuality realization shutdown?”

“That’s long done,” Gansey said. “No. I’m just very happy.”

Blue leaned against his shoulder, saying nothing. He could feel her smiling. A little later Henry shifted back on the bed and rested his head against Gansey’s other shoulder. Blue and Henry were still holding hands, interlaced fingers resting in Gansey’s lap.

“Do you want to sleep with us, by which I mean actually sleeping, not the euphemism?” Blue asked. “Because if you do we’re going to have to shift the beds before it’s too late in the evening. This one isn’t wide enough for three unless we stack.”

“I’d like that,” Henry said.

#

Finding sleeping positions for three people in two pushed-together beds was apparently complicated. Neither Henry nor Gansey wanted to leave Blue in the middle where the hard edges of the beds were; neither Blue nor Gansey wanted to leave Henry on the outside. Henry felt a little too complicated about being between them.

Blue ended up in the middle anyway, saying the edges of the beds weren’t all that hard. She lay with her back to Gansey’s chest, face-to-face with Henry, compact enough that Gansey’s arm spanned them both. Henry considered them, then hugged them back. Blue hummed, half-amused, half-contented, and said: “Good night, both of you.”

They fell asleep. Gansey lay awake for a while, listening to their even breathing, trying to discern their faces in the darkness. He didn’t want to forget this feeling. He didn’t want the moment to end. But it was dark and quiet and warm, and so sleep claimed him eventually.

#

When Gansey woke, it was very early morning, the light still faint. He wasn’t holding Blue, which meant she had somehow gotten out between them. Henry had moved closer to him, still deep asleep. He looked very serene in his sleep, which made Gansey realize Henry had always been at least a little guarded.

Blue returned and climbed back to the bed on the other side of Henry. She smiled at Gansey. Gansey smiled back.

They would have to get up soon, return the second bed to its original position, clean up the cabin to wait for their kind host’s arrival. Get back to town, and then to the road, to slightly less snowy places. But not yet. It was still early and there would be time for that later.


End file.
